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Thursday, 26 January 2017

Sometimes it is best to keep quiet. At least for a while. it
gives one time to think.

In a period of history such as the one we are living through
now, when the pressure is on to respond to political events with the immediacy
of one’s feelings, it takes an effort of will - or perhaps it is a spiritual
discipline – to stay silent. This should not be confused with quietism, or
abdication of responsibility. But what
exactly are we responsible for?

I can’t subscribe to the British playwright Edward Bond’s
Dostoevskian sentiment: “you are responsible not just for your life, or for
what happens on your doorstep, but for the universe. You have an extreme moral
responsibility”. This seems more akin to an omnipotent fantasy than a guide to responsible
moral living.

Yet the question of responsibility is real. What is my
responsibility – our responsibility – in the era of Trump, in the era of
Brexit, in the era of populist nationalism, in the post-truth era of
‘alternative facts’ (i.e. lies)? These questions have been pressing in on me
over these last months. And keeping silent – a time to reflect – is all I have
been able to manage.

And yet I can also hear that Edward Bond is right when he
says, reflecting on humanity’s consistent and insistent capacity for
inhumanity, “problems grow unseen, inch by inch, until it is too late to go
back and what was unthinkable becomes inevitable. The impossible always occurs
in history”. Indeed.

This week Trump announced details of his long-threatened intention
to build his wall between the US and Mexico. Really? The border is almost 2000
miles long. That’s a lot of advertising space that’s going to become available
for his businesses. (Spoiler alert: that was an alternative fact). But – if Trump’s
Wall is built – it will put the Berlin
Wall, Hadrian’s Wall, the West Bank wall into perspective. America first!

Admittedly the Great Wall of China can’t be surpassed
(13,000 miles) but Trump is an emotionally- regressed ignoramus and will be
claiming his wall is the longest, the best, in the history of the world. It becomes
relatively easy to predict the childlike thinking of Trump: which young boy
hasn’t chanted, in narcissistic delight, while standing on a pile of stones, “I’m
the king of the castle - and you’re a dirty rascal”?

Even though the tides of history have always swept away all
such walls, and the need for them – Israel’s is still too young to be
undermined by history – Trump’s wall will serve as a monument to his concrete
thinking and (in Melanie Klein’s terminology) his paranoid-schizoid thinking.
We all try to build walls – ‘defences’ – against what we find disturbing,
uncomfortable, unpalatable, unacceptable, invasive of our fragile sense of
well-being. Whatever thoughts enter our minds unbidden and unwanted – darker, aggressive,
disruptive, greedy, lustful or hateful thoughts – need a wall to keep them out.
Often these thoughts get projected onto the ‘other’ – and then we feel we have
to be protected from those disowned impulses which we now believe are
threatening us. Most of us only have the power to build our walls internally,
unconsciously, in fantasy. But Trump can enact it. Much good will it do him.

To whom can we turn in dark times? This is what I have been
reflecting on in this recent period of quiet. I have no certain answers,
because I distrust the impulse in me towards certainty as a response to the
certainty articulated by those whose views I abhor. I am going to try to stay
true to what I know and what I value. For example, the stance described by the
poet John Keats as ‘Negative
Capability’: when a person “is capable
of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason”.

This is clearly a time when we need ‘fact and reason’ in our
repertoire of responses. And need to know how and when to use it. But Keats is
on to something vital. We need also to be ‘capable’
of holding within ourselves all the uncertainties engendered by the new world
order. So that’s how I’m beginning to see my task: am I capable of resisting the retreat into split thinking, into
horrified condemnation, into a mirror image of Trump’s regressed thinking? I am
trying.

And trying too to look to the poets and novelists and
dramatists of the past, and the present, who are able to speak about the
infinite complexity of our lives, our potential and our limitations. Poets
whose work confirms Shelley's famous
claim (in 1821) that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".

Sometimes it is the
creative artists in our midst who have the surest finger on the pulse of the
times - and sometimes a moment of prescient insight into what will unfold in
the future, for good or ill. David Mamet, for example, in his 2008 play
November, set in the Oval Office, created a ruthless, immoral president,
Charles Smith, and penned this piece of dialogue between the President and his
adviser Archer:

Archer: (checking his notes) We can’t build the fence to keep out the
illegal immigrants

Charles: Why not?

Archer: You need the illegal immigrants to build the fence.

Jews like Mamet are
well-versed in using humour to see us through dark times. It is not the only
response we need. But it is a vital strand in the fabric of resistance and
action and reflective thinking that I sense we will have to call up in
ourselves in these next few years.